Author Archive
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Feature
Going to great lengths
November 1, 2012 12:00 AMFrom the beginning, The Atavist was a small startup with a lot of big playmates. A pioneer in the e-singles space, the Brooklyn-based company became an instant media darling, and when Amazon launched Kindle Singles in January... Continue reading
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The Kicker
USA Today’s 30th birthday bash
September 14, 2012 03:26 PMThursday night, the Gannett Company gathered employees, friends, and family at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of USA Today. Recognizing that an event in 2012 that looked back fondly on 30 years of... Continue reading
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The Kicker
CJR Audio: investing in local news startups
September 6, 2012 11:00 AMIn most of the startup world, capital is everything. It costs money to build an institution and sustain its growth until the point that revenues can match (and then, hopefully, exceed) expenses. But there’s very little capital in the world... Continue reading
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Cover Story
Made for you and me
September 5, 2012 12:00 AMAcross the street from a Fastenal hardware store in the shadow of Tulsa’s aging art-deco skyline, the staff of what is perhaps the best for-profit local journalism startup in the country has yet to reinvent the craft. Eleven... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Required skimming: journalism business models
August 29, 2012 06:50 AMThis month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers’ beats and obsessions, ranging from finance to food. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. • Nieman Journalism Lab:... Continue reading
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The Kicker
Required skimming: media news aggregators not named Romenesko
August 21, 2012 06:50 AMThis month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers’ beats and obsessions, ranging from finance to food. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. • Project for Excellence... Continue reading
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Review
All on the same page
August 8, 2012 10:31 AMMark Bauerlein, an english professor at Emory University and the author of the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts study “Reading at Risk,” tells a story about an Apple Store sales display that convinced him... Continue reading
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Behind the News
The Ford Foundation’s unprecedented grant to The Los Angeles Times
May 22, 2012 01:53 PMOn Thursday, Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj announced that his paper, once a profit engine for multi-billion dollar corporate owners and still one of the most powerful news organizations in the country, will receive a $1... Continue reading
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The Kicker
What’s Slate been up to?
May 4, 2012 12:32 PMIt's been more than a year since we profiled Slate for CJR's Guide to Online News Startups (then the News Frontier Database). Since then, the grandfather of Internet magazines lost Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah to... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
The Authentic Mexican Cookoff
April 19, 2012 02:14 PMTaco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America | By Gustavo Arellano | Scribner | 320 pages, $25.00 Recently popularized as a buzzword for genuineness, “authenticity” has a much longer history as a term used to commodify the “ethnic”... Continue reading
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Currents
Saturation Point
January 16, 2012 06:00 AMConsider the situation in many local news markets—some coverage from a newspaper, some from television, maybe one online outlet making a go of it. And then consider Evanston, Illinois, the affluent Chicago suburb that’s home to Northwestern University, where at... Continue reading
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Essay
What Can I Build Today?
November 18, 2011 09:00 AMThere are hundreds of local and regional online news startups in America, but only about five that media observers discuss with any frequency. The names will be familiar: Voice of San Diego, The Texas Tribune,... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
Failures of Vision
September 21, 2011 02:01 PMBelieving is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography | by Errol Morris | The Penguin Press | 336 pages, $40.00 Here’s a theory: every year photographs become more ubiquitous, and as that growing ubiquity builds to a certain critical... Continue reading
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Currents
News Frontier
August 28, 2011 01:49 PMEntry barriers are low in the online news world. Cheap hosting and free templates have launched a million blogs, including some where a single person, calling himself “Gazette” or “Bugle” or “Wire” or what have you, masquerades as a full-on... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
August 26, 2011 06:00 AMThe marketing team behind Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), a biopic of Edward R. Murrow set largely amid the public duel between the broadcast pioneer and the mildly outspoken anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, decided to go with a poignant,... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
Q&A: Sebastian Junger on Tim Hetherington
July 7, 2011 05:31 PMIt’s not often that one sees characters from a film gather to mourn a filmmaker. On May 24, soldiers from Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Division joined friends, colleagues, and family of Tim Hetherington for a... Continue reading
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Currents
All Politics is Local
July 5, 2011 05:01 PMOne of the most important questions facing the news industry in its search to sustain journalism online is how the models of financially successful national news sites, which have the benefit of higher traffic volume to make up for... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
Superman
July 1, 2011 10:49 AMWhen watching Superman (1978), I was reminded of the David Carradine rant from the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 2, in which he starts off with “As you know, I’m quite keen on comic books ” and goes on to talk... Continue reading
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The News Frontier
New Media Goes Door to Door in the Deep South
May 9, 2011 10:57 AMI first encountered Weld in September 2010, and it remains the only site I’m aware of that was given an award before it officially launched. Its “prototype,” a Birmingham politics and public affairs blog called Second... Continue reading
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Critical Eye
Q&A: Calvin Trillin
April 20, 2011 10:14 AMTrillin on Texas | by Calvin Trillin | University of Texas Press | 184 pages, $22.00 Last month, long-time New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin published his twenty-seventh book, a collection of nonfiction pieces about Texas and Texans titled, appropriately, Trillin... Continue reading
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Fri 3:00 PM
- Must-reads of the week
- The media news cycle is bananas
- Pass the #popcorn
- Must-reads of the week
- Tom Rosenstiel leaving Pew
The Future of Media
News Startups Guide last updated: Thu 10:24 AM
- TRVL A free iPad travel magazine
- TheDigitel A small chain of local news sites/ aggregators in South Carolina